Book Alert / Free Food for Millionaires -- A Novel

Free Food for Millionaires -- A Novel by Min Jin Lee, Warner '07, $24.99, 562 pages, ISBN #0-446-58108-9.

As the face of America becomes stunningly diverse, the need for competent cultural translators grows apace. Novelists Anchee Min and Arundhati Roy, to name a couple, have introduced Americans to the ways and folklore of China and India, respectively. Now, in her first novel, Korean-American writer Min Jin Lee helps us understand Koreans as they grapple to grab the first rung of the economic ladder.

Since first novels nearly always have an autobiographical scent about them, it's not surprising that Lee, who went to Yale, should choose an Ivy League student, Casey Han, as her protagonist. Casey, she tells us, has "a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, a popular white boyfriend, an agnostic's closeted passion for reading the Bible, and a magna cum laude degree in economics, but no job and a number of bad habits."

Korean-Americans, for reasons I don't understand, often gravitate towards the dry cleaning industry, as do Casey's parents in their home borough of Queens. Casey, by virtue of brainpower, is poised for an affluent life but lacks the backing capital of many of her Princeton classmates. Much of the novel deals with this economic tension, which is customarily heir to first-generation hyphenated Americans. Publishers Weekly says "Lee's take on contemporary intergenerational cultural friction is wide ranging, sympathetic and well worth reading."